Portugal’s Atlantic empire had a way of ignoring Brazilian nature and of making some bodies more evidentiary than others. In an age in which the South American landscape was said to brim with all manner of mirabilia and in which many metropolitan naturalists eagerly sought novelties from abroad, not one naturalist from sixteenth-century Portugal travelled to Brazil to catalogue its nature and scour it for wonders. Meanwhile, in the face of widely circulated, lurid, and pained accounts of rampant disease beginning almost as soon as concerted colonization got underway in 1549, generations of Portuguese observers continued to tout the health of Portugal’s South American colonies. In this paper, I argue that the Society of Jesus helped inaugurate both of these patterns. If, as most modern historians suggest, the Jesuits were advocates of the careful, disciplined study of natural phenomena, I argue that for the mid-sixteenth century that view is at best anachronistic. I show that the first generation of Jesuits in Portuguese America encouraged both a learned ignorance of Brazilian nature and a tendency among colonial contemporaries to dismiss the bodily manifestations of epidemic disease. I show how Jesuit accounts of both nature and disease grew out of debates within the Society over the allocation of personnel and expertise—at a time when the order itself was still relatively new, poor, vulnerable, and vying for patronage and authority.
